Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

12.22.2012

The homosexual in the text: Zak Spears as Manny Burke in "Solicitor" (1994)

It’s more
or less a given that gay pornography makes sex between men its business—but gay
pornography’s attitude toward the concept of homosexuality itself is something
far more vexed. One need only survey the
vast pool of gay pornography that advertises straight or gay-for-pay models to
see that many pornographers have, whether effectively or not, attempted to
write homosexuality out of gay porn altogether.
(Needless to say, a lot of hands have been wrung over this, with many
claiming that the fetishization of straight men in gay porn breeds
self-loathing among gay male viewers.)
Part of the issue here seems to be that the move away from narrative
pornography in the digital age (individual scenes have replaced narrative
feature films, a shift that suggests a return to pornography’s origins in
silent, single-scene stag reels and loops) has meant that gay porn films are
less likely to structure themselves around the narrative tropes of
homosexuality, such as closetedness, sexual initiation, coming out, etc. Amateur porn sites no doubt trade in their
own narratives of gay sex as experiment: “this is my first time” has itself
become a cliché of straight-guy porn.
Even so, gone seem to be the days when (some, not all) gay pornography
showed a certain investment in making itself a platform from which to speak, however
clumsily, about the experiences, whether lived or imagined, of the gay men
likely to be consuming it.

So I was
inspired to check out Solicitor (dir.
Jim Steel, 1994), which might be classified as a pornographic coming-out
film. In its own fumbling, almost quaint
way, Solicitor uses a conventional
coming-out narrative as a jumping-off point from which to stage its scenes of
sexual fantasy. Solicitor manages to capitalize both on straight-guy/closet
fantasies and the fantasy of gay romance.
Zak Spears plays a commitment-phobic attorney with a reputation for
womanizing. His affect is one of
arrogant condescension, later revealed to be nothing more than the exaggerated
swagger of a closet case. He gets off on
watching two cleaning men—both of whom are also presented as closeted men with
girlfriends—having sex in his office, a scene that proves epiphanic (“If I
didn’t know better, I’d swear you were going queer!” he tells his reflection in
the mirror afterward).

Meanwhile,
the office intern (Bo Summers), who nurses a crush on the boss, deflects his
sexual energy toward a gay friend and a conveniently delivered courier. While Summers is apparently already out of
the closet, albeit hapless and inhibited, Spears exhibits shame and contempt in his
scene with a male stranger he picks up at the pier. The film makes it clear that Spears and
Summers, fated for one another, must heal one another’s sexual
hang-ups. Their long-awaited sex scene
together is staged as romantically as any final clinch from the end of a
Hollywood movie: it announces their formation as a couple (the final shot finds
them cuddling in bed together).

My point is
not to hail Solicitor as a
ground-breaking or even particularly noteworthy pornographic film; it’s rather
to remind us that we can look to pornography as readily as to any number of
other film genres in order to see how narratives of homosexuality have
proliferated. It’s a notion to which I
hope to return in the new year, when I plan to look at a handful of films from
pornography’s golden age. Stay
tuned.